Common Ground

Our inboxes are filled daily with newsletters and blogs on deals and dealmaking.

Good deals that went bad; bad deals that got worse; bad deal climates improving; getting the deal done; getting the right deal done. There’s a fair amount of skepticism built in to most of these reports and commentary, which is consistent with traditional dealmaking. In his recent retrospective Ten Years After,

http://www.thedeal.com/newsweekly/features/ten-years-after.php,

The Deal’s editor Robert Teitelman discusses the skepticism with which even reporting on and writing about deals was received in the late 90’s: “Dealmaking was a state of mind, a psychology, a way of organizing the world.”

True enough: dealmaking is analog and human in many respects. Initial interest, exploring synergies and due diligence, if mutually beneficial and successful, give way to a negotiation process. That negotiation process can be characterized either by skillful, conflict-avoiding give and take, or by shrewd but deadlock-producing demands and concessions.  It’s all a matter of the state of mind.

Back to the inboxes and all those commentaries on getting the deal done, and the thought arises that so much is written about the complexities of dealmaking precisely because it’s still a state of mind. The art of the deal is premised on mindset, skill and human factors such as identifying opportunity, establishing rapport and negotiating. But what about the science part of the dealmaking – the framework?  How many deals break down in negotiation because a process that could be consistent and commonly accepted is treated as a state of mind?

It’s a statistic that won’t show up in our inboxes, but it’s fair to say that assumptions, idiosyncratic manual inefficiencies and just plain old human error are factors.  At Transaction Commons we believe that as the business climate undergoes continued change, the way in which deals are organized will need to adapt, along with our mindsets.

Those “analog,” human elements that constitute the art of the deal can be deal-makers when they are judiciously combined with consistent, commonly accepted processes.  Enabling these portions of the deal with accessible technology in turn enables humans to get the deal done.